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Happy Anniversary Adventures
Tod & I celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary in Shimobe Onsen, Yamanashi, this weekend. One night and two days neatly encapsulated two dozen years of marriage. The town is one of the 100 Famous Onsen of Japan, but nobody has heard of it. It’s a one-street village with ten hotels, four restaurants, one bar, a…
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Here come the Olympics
Tokyo’s Olympic bid for the 2020 summer games won out over Istanbul and Madrid yesterday. I am sure the Games that run in seven years’ time (July 24 – August 9, 2020) will be a success and give a boost to the local economy. Tourism will boom. Bilingual folks in Japan will have lots of…
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Summer Survival by Liquids
The summer weather in Tokyo is always brutal. Every year seems worse than the last, but it’s usually about the same – there are a couple of weeks when it is entirely too hot to eat, think or do much of anything. We push through the days without aircon here at home. It’s not a…
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Shape of Today
My day was spent traversing the city in a most inefficient but still sort of wonderful way. I had a ukulele lesson (1), collected my forgotten camera and Colleen’s ipod from Roon Roon (2), returned Colleen’s ipod to her (3), and ran some errands (4). Look at the pretty shape I made as I moved myself around town.
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Summer 2012 Conservation Tips
Setsuden – power conservation season – begins on Monday. This summer there will be no nuclear power generated at all, which means 11.8 gigawatts less to use. It’s made up for in part by coal (an unclean nightmare) and small increase in renewable sources, but the upshot is we have a little less power this…
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Solstice Breakfast Guest
It’s been way too long since a friend’s called us after missing the last train home – just about everyone’s got kids now and they are far too responsible to be out drinking late into the evening. So what a delight to hear from UltraBob last night. Yay! Midnight greetings and digging into the stash…
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The Postman Rang
On the weekend, I had mailed a little box of goodies to some friends in Australia, where there are strict rules are about what can be admitted into the country. I know not to send seeds, plants, raw foods, wood, and dried grasses so I was careful to avoid those sorts of things. But I…
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The Great Outdoors
I love being outside and the longer I am in nature, the better I feel. Camping on Niijima is one of the highlights of my year. Over the Golden Week holidays we hosted Guru-guru Camp and stayed at Habushiura campsite for 13 days. It was blissful. The weather was as predictably unpredictable as always. There…
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Unrelated thoughts
I keep having ideas for blog posts – topics meaty enough to be more than a tweet or status update on Facebook – but for whatever reason I talk myself out of writing up my thoughts. I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging, and that’s a shame for me (maybe not such a big…
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Modernist Dining in Bunkyo
Dessert last night blew me away. Pictured above you see a “deconstructed apple crumble” that involved nitrogen-frozen whipped cream with a hot caramel soup poured over cubes of apple, cinnamon cookie crumbs, caramel ice cream and a slice of dried apple. It was such an impressive presentation and my first experience with “molecular gastronomy.” The rest of…
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